1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to error-correction decoding, and, more particularly, to control of error-correction processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many telecommunication applications require transmission of signals between centralized stations handling traffic from a network and remote units providing a communication link for a user to the centralized station. Further, remote units may not necessarily have access to continuous, external power supplies. For example, the remote unit may often be entirely powered by a battery, which must be charged from time to time, or may have a battery as a back-up power source in the event that a main power source is disrupted. Remote units may be, for example, portable personal computers, hand-held radio devices, handheld phones or wireless sets. In addition, new telemetry applications, such as home security monitoring, may have battery power for remote units such as sensors.
Conservation of battery power in battery-powered wireless applications, in particular, is of growing importance. First, such units tend to be small and lightweight, requiring a battery having small physical size. Such batteries tend to also store and make available limited power as a consequence of small size. As is known, the time between recharging these batteries is dependent upon power consumed by the unit. Power consumed, in-turn, is dependent upon an amount of processing performed by the unit, such as call processing, paging and broadcast channel monitoring and memory administration. Typically, units are maintained in an inactive mode until a request to initiate a communication link is made. However, even in an inactive mode, units are often still monitoring common channels of the wireless network, which requires some processing and, hence, power consumption.
One type of processing performed is error-correction encoding in a transmit path and error-correction decoding in a receive path. Error-correction encoding typically requires minimal processing steps, and so error-correction encoding is usually enabled in a transmitter since little power is required. Error-correction decoding, however, is typically computationally intense, requiring substantial power.